This video was recorded at Authors@MIT. After Microsoft decided to set up a research lab in China in 1998, authors Bob...
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This video was recorded at Authors@MIT. After Microsoft decided to set up a research lab in China in 1998, authors Bob Buderi and Gregory Huang tagged along to find out how one of the West's leading corporations tackled innovation and partnership with a developing economic giant. Says Buderi, "We tried to tell the story through the eyes of the people involved. We went to parties with them; played basketball with them….We hope in the process we've drawn out lessons of doing business with any emerging nation, in ways that are more fun and memorable than any management treatise." Microsoft, say the authors, went at the problem of opening up the China market in a way that was a departure for most Western companies. Instead of focusing on sales or cheap manufacturing possibilities, Bill Gates imagined tapping into China's vast pool of talented computer science students and harnessing their energy in a way that would be mutually beneficial to Microsoft and China. He visited China's top leaders repeatedly over the years, building a relationship and opening doors. He practiced Guanxi, a Chinese term that conveys trust and mutuality. Says Huang, the "most important principle is that relationships must be nurtured over time. They can't be bought or rushed." Microsoft found the perfect person to head the venture – Kai-Fu Lee, who became one of the key characters in Guanxi. Born in Taiwan and educated in the U.S., Kai-Fu understood how to sell Microsoft's idea to Chinese officials and academics. He recruited the cream of the crop, says Huang, and hired senior staff to mentor young talent. There were bumps along the way: Brilliant as they were, young recruits, says Buderi, "were used to following specific instructions and wouldn't dream of taking off on their own course." This sparked a crisis in the lab, leading to much longer training times. Within a few years, the lab built up five core areas of expertise, in speech recognition, multimedia, graphics, wireless, and search, and began pumping out world-class papers and patents. Paradoxically, note the authors, Microsoft's success has inspired imitators, most notably Google, which snapped up Kai-Fu Lee to launch a similar lab in China. Vicious lawsuits notwithstanding, the authors believe "Microsoft had a nice run, but things will get better now with competition."

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This video was recorded at Authors@MIT. Robert Kanigel's High Season: How One French Riviera Town Has Seduced Travelers for...
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This video was recorded at Authors@MIT. Robert Kanigel's High Season: How One French Riviera Town Has Seduced Travelers for Two Thousand Years (Viking, 2002) is a colorful story of what happens when traveler and destination meet, it also offers a probing look at the transforming power of tourism as an industry. Drawing on primary sources that cover literally two millennia, High Season is a book about what pleasure and escape has meant across the ages by telling the story of one place: the prince jewel, Nice. High Season is an intelligent journey through the history and the streets of Nice that vividly demonstrates why Nice reigned as queen of the Riviera, and how the lessons learned by this once-modest medieval town apply to the Nantuckets, Venices, Aspens and Salzburgs of the world. Kanigel's portrait stands for all of the tourist meccas of the world; for every exotic haven which suffers tension between visitor and host; for every tourist destination that has risen to popularity, peaked, and wondered what to do next.

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This video was recorded at MIT World Series: Media in Transition 4: The Work of Stories. True stories and their fictional...
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This video was recorded at MIT World Series: Media in Transition 4: The Work of Stories. True stories and their fictional spin-offs -- especially bloody ones -- occupy an enduring spot in western culture. Thomas Pettitt's specialty, the "murdered sweetheart" tale, emerged from medieval times to seize hold of the public imagination in England and Scandinavia over several centuries. The story, involving a seduced girl, her murder by a lover, and the lover's death, stems from some long-lost actual case. Publishers cranked out ballads based on this story, with helpfully lurid woodcut illustrations. In this "highly successful genre," says Pettitt, "marketing strategies" distilled the "shocking and juicy story" down to the bare bones. "I sometimes wonder if the weapon of choice was a knife because it rhymes conveniently with wife," muses Pettitt. The sinking of the Titanic sparked a media frenzy all too familiar these days: reporters rowed out to meet survivors, so they could wire their newspapers first. Richard Howells takes stock of this tragedy and its media manipulation over time. First the Edwardians "celebrated the heroism, triumph, Anglo-Saxon pluck and courage" of the voyagers, with newsreels (including one a month after the tragedy), postcards, sheet music and records. Later, fiction films exploited the story as a fable about the emerging middle class. In our own times, with the epic James Cameron film and assorted merchandise including Titanic software, and beer, Howells sees the Titanic as an "allegory for decline, disaster, decadence and doom …and finally as kitsch-entertainment." As a modern myth, the Titanic has become "a multimedia narrative." Janet Staiger finds lots of reasons for storytelling, from the anthropological to the psychoanalytical. But she emphasizes "economic explanations: the standardization of stories for a capitalist purpose." We know that a murdered sweetheart ballad "will be a seller," so it can be premarketed and mass-produced. Some stories get yoked to particular characters, and others can wander more freely across formulas. Staiger compares Barbie and Cinderella, stuck in their plot lines, to Batman, who can show up in detective, adventure, parody or melodrama form. The "ability to sell figures separate from a formula enhances their capacity for capitalization," says Staiger.

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This video was recorded at MIT Communications Forum. The collapse of print and other traditional news and the rise of...
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This video was recorded at MIT Communications Forum. The collapse of print and other traditional news and the rise of celebrity culture have contributed to the sharp decline of in-depth stories involving race and society, say these two speakers, in a discussion that's replete with personal anecdote. Juan Williams sets out detailing his childhood dreams to break into the newspaper business. He read all the New York papers for baseball coverage, "and noticed no people of color telling their stories … The absence struck me." From prep school through college, Williams found internships at progressively larger papers, which had at most a handful of black reporters, and often denied those the right to bylines. But the turmoil of the '60s, recalls Williams, led to a wave of more militant black journalists who demanded respect and greater attention to their own communities. In spite of some gains, Williams does not see signs of great progress over the years. President Obama's election may have led to more African-American commentators, but Williams is the only regular person of color on Washington's Sunday morning talk shows, which he describes as "conversations among elite white males." Nor are there African-American anchors: "It always comes down to, 'Is the audience going to relate to a black male as lead dog?'" Williams deplores the "pandering" that big media institutions engage in with people of color. An executive at a black cable network, rejecting the idea of a news show, told Williams that the black men "who would identify with you like to watch sports and pornography…" Magazines like Ebony, Jet, and Essence focus on the "fabulously rich singer or superstar," and avoid discussing the nation's social and economic crises. There's "no investment of money, or placing journalists in a position to tell you critical stories … to find the political power players who have their fingers on the levers causing distress in lower income communities. It doesn't exist." J. Phillip Thompson believes that the waning of local newspapers like New York's Amsterdam News marks the end of one of the last resources communities of color have to learn about issues affecting them. As a former public housing manager in New York, he knows the importance of reporters scrutinizing the words and actions of politicians. Now "I'll read about a shooting in a mainstream newspaper. But the voice of community and debates I heard all the time I don't read about." He traces a class divide in black America today that's different from previous incarnations. For instance, black officials representing majority black districts "don't want issues, don't want people excited." Elected leadership, he says, is not focused on addressing "fundamental problems like jobs, the fact that people can't pay mortgages, raise families. Instead of dealing with that, officials move onto other issues like Skip Gates being arrested off of his porch. That's unfortunate, but it's just not a vital issue in black America."

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This video was recorded at ENGL 300 - Introduction to Theory of Literature. In this lecture on psychoanalytic criticism,...
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This video was recorded at ENGL 300 - Introduction to Theory of Literature. In this lecture on psychoanalytic criticism, Professor Paul Fry explores the work of Jacques Lacan. Lacan's interest in Freud and distaste for post-Freudian "ego psychologists" are briefly mentioned, and his clinical work on "the mirror stage" is discussed in depth. The relationship in Lacanian thought, between metaphor and metonymy is explored through the image of the point de capiton. The correlation between language and the unconscious, and the distinction between desire and need, are also explained, with reference to Hugo's "Boaz Asleep." Reading assignment: Lacan, Jacques. "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious." In The Critical Tradition, pp. 1129-48 Resources: Handout: Paper Topics 1 [PDF]

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This video was recorded at ENGL 300 - Introduction to Theory of Literature. In this lecture, Professor Paul Fry examines...
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This video was recorded at ENGL 300 - Introduction to Theory of Literature. In this lecture, Professor Paul Fry examines trends in African-American criticism through the lens of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Toni Morrison. A brief history of African-American literature and criticism is undertaken, and the relationship of both to feminist theory is explicated. The problems in cultural and identity studies of essentialism, "the identity queue," expropriation, and biology are surveyed, with particular attention paid to the work of Michael Cooke and Morrison's reading of Huckleberry Finn. At the lecture's conclusion, the tense relationship between African-American studies and New Critical assumptions are explored with reference to Robert Penn Warren's poem, "Pondy Woods." Reading assignment: Gates, Jr., Henry Louis. "Writing, 'Race,' and the Difference It Makes." In The Critical Tradition, pp. 1891-1902 Morrison, Toni. "Playing in the Dark." In The Critical Tradition, pp. 1791-1800

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This video was recorded at ITAL 310 - Dante in Translation. Professor Mazzotta introduces students to the general scheme...
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This video was recorded at ITAL 310 - Dante in Translation. Professor Mazzotta introduces students to the general scheme and scope of the Divine Comedy and to the life of its author. Various genres to which the poem belongs (romance, epic, vision) are indicated, and special attention is given to its place within the encyclopedic tradition. The poem is then situated historically through an overview of Dante's early poetic and political careers and the circumstances that led to his exile. Professor Mazzotta concludes by discussing the central role Dante's exile was to play in his poetic project. Reading assignment: None assigned Resources: Visual Resources - Lecture 1 [HTML]

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